"Gold-bowed," said Mrs. Green, with a look of unalloyed delight, pointing to her sister-in-law's spectacles; and Aunt Melissa repeated indulgently,—
"Yes, yes, gold-bowed. I'll let you take 'em a spell, arter I've set my heel. It'll please her, poor creatur'!" she added, in an audible aside to Amanda. Since the time when Mrs. Green's wits had ceased to work normally, she had treated her sympathetically, but from a lofty eminence. Aunt Melissa was perhaps too prosperous. She sat there, swaying back and forth, in her thin black silk trimmed with narrow rows of velvet, her heavy chin sunk upon a broad collar, worked in her youth, and she seemed to Mrs. Green a vision of majesty and delight, but to Amanda a virtuous censor, necessarily to be obeyed, yet whose presence made the summer day intolerable. Even her purple cap-ribbons bespoke terror to the evil-doer, and her heavy face was set, as a judgment, toward the doom of the man who knew not how to account for his actions. She began speaking again, and Amanda involuntarily gave a little start, as at a lightning flash.
"I says to myself when I drove off, this mornin': 'I'll have a little talk with 'Mandy. I don' go there to spend a day more'n four times a year, an' like as not she'll be glad to have somebody to speak to, seen' 's her mother's how she is.'"
Amanda gave a quick look at Mrs. Green; but the old lady was busily pleating the hem of her apron and then smoothing it out again. Aunt Melissa rocked, and went on:—
"I says to myself: 'Here they let Kelup carry on the farm at the halves, an' go racin' an' trottin' from the other place over here day in an' day out. An' when his Uncle Nat died, two year ago, then was the time for him to come over here an' marry 'Mandy an' carry on the farm. But no, he'd rather hang round the old place, an' sleep in the ell-chamber, an' do their chores for his board, an' keep on a-runnin' over here.' An' when young Nat married, I says to myself, 'That'll make him speak.' But it didn't—an' you 're a laughin'-stock, 'Mandy Green, if ever there was one. Every time the neighbors see him steppin' by Saturday nights, all fixed up, with that brown coat on he's had sence the year one, they have suthin' to say, 'Goin' over to 'Mandy's,' that's what they say. An' on'y last Saturday one on 'em hollered out to me, when I was pickin' a mess o' pease for Sunday, 'Wonder what 'Mandy'll answer when he gits round to askin' of her?' I hadn't a word to say. 'You better go to him,' says I, at last."
Amanda had put down her sewing in her lap, and was looking steadfastly out of the window, with eyes brimmed by two angry tears. Once she wiped them with a furtive movement of the white garment in her lap; her cheeks were crimson. Aunt Melissa had lashed herself into a cumulative passion of words.
"An' I says to myself, 'If there ain't nobody else to speak to 'Mandy, I will,' I says, when I was combin' my hair this mornin'. 'She 'ain't got no mother,' I says, 'nor as good as none, an' if she 'ain't spunk enough to look out for herself, somebody's got to look out for her.' An' then it all come over me—I'd speak to Kelup himself, an' bein' Saturday night, I knew I should ketch him here."
"O Aunt Melissa!" gasped Amanda, "you wouldn't do that!"
"Yes, I would, too!" asserted Aunt Melissa, setting her firm lips. "You see if I don't, an' afore another night goes over my head!"
But while Amanda was looking at her, paralyzed with the certainty that no mortal aid could save her from this dire extremity, there came an unexpected diversion. Old Lady Green spoke out clearly and decidedly from her corner, in so rational a voice that it seemed like one calling from the dead.